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gross domestic product

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are proposing to cut the corporate tax rate. With any tax cut, members of Congress want to know how much revenue the government may lose from the reform. I do not think that cutting our 35 percent federal corporate tax rate to 20 percent or so would lose the government any money over the long term. U.S. and foreign corporations would invest more in the United States, which would boost our economy, and corporations would avoid and evade taxes less.

In a recent bulletin, I argued that public-sector unions impose various costs and burdens on state and local governments. Here is some more evidence.

The chart below shows a scatter plot of the union shares in state/local government workforces and state/local government debt levels as a share of state gross domestic product. Each blue dot is a U.S. state.

The expansion in government and poor state of the economy got me thinking about how government growth is reflected in measured gross domestic product. So here is a wonky look at the treatment of government in the Bureau of Economic Analysis GDP data.

Data notes: By “government,” I mean total federal, state, and local. For 2009, I’m using the average of second and third quarter data. All data from BEA Tables here.

Why blame only media and politicians for the public’s confusion about imports and trade deficits? Surely economists deserve some scorn. Some of the misunderstanding can be traced to the famous National Income Identity, which expresses gross domestic product, as: Y = C + G + I + (X-M).